


I would tear the world apart for you.

by AidaRonan



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Big Brother Bucky Barnes, Bucky is a nerd, Bucky loves Wakanda, First Dance, First Kiss, Fix-It, Healing the universe through the power of love, M/M, Nerd Bucky Barnes, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Canon Fix-It, Science Nerd Bucky Barnes, Slow Dancing, Thanos is a big purple moron, You Decide, appropriate use of billie holiday, dance lessons, established stucky, everyone is only a little dead, except it's less cheesy than that in the story i promise, old married men, or is the universe fixing itself and they're just helping it along?, pre-war stucky, sarah rogers probably knew about stucky, shuri and bucky: science pals, some kind of warning for Steve being a little self-destructive as per usual, some mild canon divergence, steve and shuri: pal pals, steve doesn't exactly hate it there, team steve and shuri fixing the universe, you know how he gets especially without bucky boy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-17 18:20:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 15,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15467250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AidaRonan/pseuds/AidaRonan
Summary: Thanos tears the universe in half, steals brothers from sisters, nephews from aunts, lovers from lovers."Oh God,Bucky."Chaos ripples through all of creation, pushing it dangerously close to the brink.But the universe doesn't give up without a fight, and there are things more powerful than the stones.





	1. Whispers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to say this story is written in full aside from some edits. It should go up pretty quickly. 
> 
> (This beginning part is short, but the chapters vary pretty widely in length because anarchy.)

Awareness comes slowly, if it can even be called that. The first thing he becomes conscious of is his consciousness itself. It’s vaguely there—some kind of nebulous entity—containing all he was, is, and ever will be.

Bucky. His name is Bucky. James? God no, not that.

That information reverberates for some time, echoing over and over in what’s left of him. There is no sense of passing time, no sense of time at all. He feels no urgency to move on to another thought, no urgency to do anything for that matter.

Drifting. Just drifting.

Past, present, and future exist simultaneously and not at all.

Where is the rest of him? Where is the rest of Bucky? 

The heaviness of his left arm is gone, replaced with the sense that he has no left arm at all, no nothing in fact. His mind reaches out for toes to wiggle, for lungs to inflate. Bucky has neither, not even phantoms of what should be.

Should he be?

He can’t tell if he’s gone or if the context is what’s really missing. Sensory deprivation. He thinks he remembers it from a long time ago, something bad—What is good? What is bad?—from yesterday, from tomorrow, from now.

Either way, everything is dark, empty, weightless. No end; no beginning. Corporeal, he finds, is a relative term. His senses reach out and come back empty. Or maybe it’s the senses themselves that he’s missing. Chicken or the egg? Doesn’t matter.

He is Bucky and he is nothing drifting through nothing.

Except the whispers.

They come on suddenly, or maybe they were already there. Voices, so many voices that he can’t distinguish one from the other. They all run together as one—dozens or thousands or trillions all blending into continuous radio static.

He focuses, drifts, focuses until he manages to pull one single clear word out of all of it.

“ _Failsafe.”_  He can’t tell if the voice is male or female, young or old—are those things that even matter? All he knows is that it’s not like the last voice that helped pull him from  _somewhere else_ , not like the last one at all.

“ _Steve,”_  Bucky tries to say, pushing the sound out through vocal chords that do not exist, though lips that are not there.  _“Steve.”_

The name comes back to him as a whisper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise this ends happy for the boys. I promise.


	2. Imbalance

Contrary to the beliefs of many living in it, the universe does not like chaos. It craves order. Order through natural laws, through harmony and balance. Lose a thousand lives in New York City; gain a thousand lives throughout the cosmos, one by one.

The scales stay level for an eternity.

Until they don’t.

The stones were never meant to be found, were certainly never meant to be reunited, and were definitely not meant to be used to circumvent, well, everything.

There’s too much chaos and the universe tips with it, listing dangerously to one side. Without correction it’ll soon be treading water, and the flooding will be quick and final.

_Annihilation_.

Half of all, the universe knows, is madness. Half of all is broken hearts and broken bodies and fire and wreckage and where is my son and a kingdom with no king and oh god my baby and why Bucky, why is it always Bucky?

The universe doesn’t know how or what to do; and so it must undo.

_Failsafe_.

* * *

It takes Steve days before he finally gets in a shower. Days of sleeping in Bucky’s bed in Wakanda, still in his uniform. At least the pillows finally have a smell. Bucky’s had been missing when he laid down—the pillows and sheets all freshly washed, probably for his benefit. Sometime in the middle of the first night, he tears the entire bed apart looking for something, anything. A hair, a stain, any sign at all of the man who used to sleep in it.

As a last resort, he ends up on his phone, scrolling through photo after photo to stop the part of him that questions whether or not Bucky Barnes even ever existed, the part that asks him if he _really_ made it back from that train to find him again or if Steve imagined it all. He looks at every single image he has, again and again—curses himself for not taking a million more—until the battery dies.

And then he weeps.

Days, and he doesn’t eat. Sleep feels like a distant dream. The few times he does doze off, he watches faces dissolve into ashes before being lost to the wind. Bucky. Sam. T’Challa. Others, so many others. Gone in a blink because they failed to stop it.

Because _Steve_ failed to stop it.

No one checks on him. They’re all too busy mourning ghosts of their own.

In Bucky’s small bathroom, he finally pulls off the tattered uniform. It feels like he’s climbing a mountain instead of getting undressed—like he’s back before the war, struggling against his lungs to make it up a single flight of stairs. But just like then, he somehow does it, shedding piece by piece over the course of an hour, staring listlessly at the bathroom mirror in between. There is a man on the other size of the glass just as lost and hopeless as he is, but he can’t, won’t, _can’t_ look at him.

The shower could be freezing or scalding. Either way, he doesn't really feel it. He stands under the spout, letting it wash away as much grime and blood as it can through pressure alone. He doesn’t have the energy to scrub, and some part of him knows he has a vague hope that something’s left of him, some microscopic piece of the other half of him hanging on forever.

Maybe that’s why he somehow manages to pick up the uniform and drape it over the back of a chair, reverently setting the brown leather gloves on top. Maybe he’ll bury that since there’s no body. Maybe he’ll let the old empty grave in Brooklyn be enough like it was before.

He remembers the first time, how the chasm in his heart ached and ached, and he thought it would never stop aching.

He’d been right. It hadn’t. Not until the bridge where the ache shifted into something else. Not until after the fight with Tony. After more ice. After, after, _after_. They were always waiting for something to end.

At least he’d gotten a moment. A moment between the cold and another fucking war. A moment of finally, dear fucking God, _finally_.

There isn’t a single physical trace of Bucky Barnes left, but Steve can still feel his fingers sliding between his own, can still feel his breath on his ear, the warmth that sprang up between two people who’d both known far too much chill.

It feels like a lifetime ago.

It feels like Steve is the one who died.

The chasm will ache and ache and never ever stop, he knows. This time it will never goddamn stop.

He pulls on Bucky’s clothes and climbs into bed—a bare mattress, the sheets on the floor in ribbons. He doesn’t see the word written in the fog on the bathroom mirror— _failsafe._

It's long gone by the time he stirs again. 


	3. Somehow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, have some more a n g s t.

The universe is an endless sphere. An bubble of loops where all things bleed into other things.

Now it is bleeding into itself.

But all wounds can be healed, and the stitching has already started. 

Faster, faster, the needle keeps weaving. 

 

* * *

Just like showering and sleeping, eating nearly tumbles into the pit of unspeakable grief. Steve thinks more than once that he might just let it have him, just lie there and wait to fall. Even the serum has its limits. And he’s so goddamn tired, and there are needles in his chest so deep that even Erskine’s miracle couldn’t push them out.

“ _Yeah, Stevie, because that’s what I’d fucking want.”_

It’s not Bucky, not really. Just the ghost of him that lives inside of Steve always. But Steve listens to him anyway, forcing himself up and out of the apartment. He has to pass through Shuri’s lab on the way, because the second Bucky had seen the place, he’d had to be close, to see the future and suck up as much knowledge as Shuri would willingly lend him. There’d been laughter and jokes about “fraternizing with colonizers,” but she’d also let him tinker endlessly, and she’d sent him outside to test everything from weapons to suits to a hover board.

“ _Holy shit, Stevie. Imagine if Howard could see this!” He's forgiven himself enough to remember him._

The lab is eerily quiet now, empty and dark. There’s broken glass on the floor, something Steve doesn’t realize until the pads of his feet are already in tatters. He should go back for his boots.

But why bother?

And by the time he makes it up the winding ramps to other people, the bleeding has already stopped; the serum has pushed out the glass. It’s like it was never there to begin with.

Funny how that keeps happening.

Steve doesn’t find much comfort in the grieving crowd. Someone tells him most of the surviving Avengers are already gone—maybe they had enough in them to keep going; maybe they just wanted to be somewhere else. Bruce is still there, staring blankly out the windows. Mostly though, there are grieving Wakandans. Okoye’s forehead holds a deep crease even as she stands behind Shuri, guarding her new queen, eyes darting to her constantly like she too might disappear. Even still, there's a quiet strength in both of them, chins up despite the way their shoulders slump. Steve wishes it was somehow catching, that he could stand near them and be infected with it like a cold.

He hasn’t had one of those in a very, very long time.

_Bucky holding him, one hand softly pressed into middle of chest. Chest firm against Steve’s back. Breathe, Stevie, breathe. Breathe like me._

_A lifetime later, Bucky’s fingertips sliding down his torso, their skin stained purple by the light filtering in through the apartment window. Steve shaking and shaking, lungs erratic. A wicked grin and glinting eyes. Breathe, Stevie, because I’d like to do this more than once, you know?_

He finds flat bread and fruit and dishes that vaguely remind him of the casseroles people sent over after his mother died. He can’t fathom how anyone managed to cook in all of this, how life seems to be going on in some kind of way with grief so thick in the air he can taste it. Then again, he supposes he’s doing the same thing. Going on somehow, if this even counts. He eats mechanically, piece by piece, bite by bite. He wants to stop after one swallow, but he keeps packing it in, keeps forcing things down his throat like sandpaper through a straw.

A few people embrace him, put hands on his shoulders, rake palms over his back. He thinks he might speak to some here and there, small murmurs about how he’s okay or he’s sorry (and he is— _he’s so so fucking sorry_ ). But it’s all a fog, all a radio in another room that he knows is there but only just.

By the time he’s done, Bruce still hasn’t moved. And Steve doesn’t have the strength to move him.

* * *

The voices are both a whisper and a cacophony. All at once, somehow both. For the longest time (no time at all), all Bucky can pick out is a single word. Repeating infinitely.

_Failsafe, failsafe, failsafe_.

Why that? Why?

Then Steve. A name still cycling through what's left of him over and over again, sustaining him like the blood or oxygen he no longer needs.

But who is Steve and why does he care so much and why does he feel so empty and fucking incomplete without _Steve_? When he finally remembers what his own voice sounds like, he realizes where the name is coming from.

He finds other voice too, other names. Some he thinks should be familiar. Some he's sure he never knew.

_Shuri – Steve – Leslie – Okoye – Muhammad – Aunt May – Failsafe – Abuela – Rocket – Deepshikha – Vladimir – Steve – Mom – Failsafe – Dad – Gamora_

Every single voice sings with longing so deep it skips across the surface of unfathomable.

Who is Steve and why should he care and why does he feel like he’s been torn the fuck in half without _Steve_?

_Maybe it’s finally the end of the line, pal._

He has no idea what that means, but the thought of it feels like a blunt knife ripping straight through muscle and bone. If he had a throat anymore, he might choke from the pain of it.

Defiantly, he thinks, _no, no it’s goddamn not._

A brief flash of something besides nothing. A face—overgrown and world-weary—and _oh, so that’s Steve._

_Oh God, **Steve.**_

If he had arms to reach with, he would break them both for trying. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's subscribed/commented/bookmarked/kudos'd so far. Bless your faces and your souls.


	4. Fractals

He dreams of Bucky ripping into him for being an idiot, and maybe that’s why he actually remembers the shoes this time. There’s still glass in the lab. It’s like everything is at a quiet standstill, like people hope if they don’t acknowledge it all happened, then maybe it’ll just unhappen.

“ _All the stuff they did to me, Steve, I know I gotta, but I hate digging into it. It’s like maybe it’ll be easier to wake up if I don’t look too close at the nightmare.”_

Steve’s tried to wake up at least a million times now, but the hole in his heart is bottomless, and he just keeps falling deeper and deeper.

More food that feels like swallowing tacks. Shuri comes and sits next to him without a word, fidgeting with the panther necklace around her neck. They eat in silence, and somehow that makes things feel easier even if easier is a lot like being stabbed by nineteen knives instead of twenty.

She finally manages to force out words near the end, right around the time that all Steve wants is to be back in Bucky’s bed, wallowing in the hollowness of it all.

“I know,” she says.

“Yeah.” He knows too. 

Back in the room, he finally manages to look at himself for the first time in a week. The serum hides a lot of what might show in someone else, but it can’t take the ache out of his eyes. He wonders if that’s how Thanos’s allegedly indiscriminate plan actually worked. If it looked at a universe full of wholes and rent them all in half.

There are still pill bottles lined up on the edge of the sink, all marked J.B. Barnes. All dosages high enough to kill an elephant, prescribed by T’Challa’s personal physician. He picks one up and stares at the label. Then the next, then the next. _J.B Barnes. J.B. Barnes. J.B. Barnes._

Steve doesn’t remember making the decision or even making the movement, but several bottles fly at the bathroom mirror, hard enough to scatter pills everywhere and shatter glass. He looks at himself in fractals, a million blue eyes separated by cracks.

He almost misses the pair that don’t match. But he could pick those eyes out of a crowd of thousands. His lungs seize up like they used to when he was a boy. His heart skips one beat, then another. He feels so small. 

“Bucky?” he breathes. 

Fingers splay across a single pane of glass, but whatever was there isn’t there anymore.

* * *

Bucky knows the place and the man. He knows like he knows his name is Bucky and the whisper is his.

Where? Who? _Still Steve, just with more hair._ But where?

Dig deeper, Bucky. _Just like before_.

At first it feels like pulling mud through the eye of a needle. There’s nothing to grasp and yank, no shape to hold onto as it oozes its way through.

But it comes. The floodgates open inch by inch, and then it all comes pouring in like a storm surge. 

“ _Hey, you alright, pal? Because you look like shit."_ _(Jeez, that face, torn to bits and all he can do is keep muttering, 'The dog. Had to. The dog.') – “Breathe like me.” (If you die on me Rogers, I swear, I’ll kill you myself.) – “About what it’d be like to kiss a dame. Maybe we...” (Jesus, his lips are so fucking soft. He tastes like peppermint.) – “When I get back, we’ll see the future together.” (We’ll figure it out, won’t we? Somehow?) – “I’m glad he’s gotta stay there, Ma. I don’t want him here.” (I don’t want to lose him. I’d rather die than see his perfect face in these goddamn trenches.) – “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” (who shouldn't even be here. Why couldn't you just...?) – An endless scream, falling down down down. (Death isn’t even the scary part, not really. It’s that I’m leaving you behind. Who's gonna watch your six now?) – “Where the fuck is Steve?” (Pain, electricity, cold, blank.) – "Is Steve okay? Where is he?" (Pain, electricity, cold, blank.) _–_ “Who the hell is Bucky?” (I **know** him. Pain, electricity, Steve, pain.) – “Breathe, Stevie, because I’d like to do this more than once, you know?” (Still so soft, those lips. And Christ, he’s shaking all over, and I don’t think anything will ever be close enough.) – “Maybe because I love you, you moron.” (Stop trying to fight everything on your own.) – “Steve?” (Not again. Please don’t make me do this to him again.)_

If he still had a body, he'd be trembling violently. 

He uses the sharp longing ricocheting through him as a laser, focusing all that’s left on remembering the lines of Steve’s face.

Except there are two Steves, no dozens of Steves, all reflected back in shards of shattered glass. For a second, he thinks he-

“ _Bucky?”_

Falling back into the nothing is like a punch to the gut. But if he pushed through once…

* * *

Steve pulls every single shard of glass out of the mirror, clawing at the edges with his fingertips and digging them out one by one. It doesn’t matter that he’s tearing himself apart in the process, that there’s blood everywhere, that his fingers ache because every time they start to heal, he digs back in. It just matters that he knows what he saw. And he knows it seems crazy, but so does a literal Norse god with a magic hammer and a damned talking space raccoon.

Bucky was there, goddammit. He was fucking there.

He claws and claws until all that’s left is an empty frame.

“Bucky, if you’re…” God, he sounds like that stupid ghost show Clint likes to watch. (Is Clint even..?) “Buck, if you can hear me, tell me how to fix this.” _Just tell me what to do_.

He almost misses it, almost covers it up when he sighs long and deep, because he’s so tired and maybe he is crazy after all.

But there it is, faint as a soft spring breeze rippling through tall grass. A single whisper.

“ _Steve.”_

He’s on his feet then, standing in the middle of the bathroom trying to figure out where the hell it came from. He'll tear apart the very fabric of reality with his bare goddamn hands to touch him again. But the sound was seemingly sourceless, almost like he heard it more in his own head than anywhere else.

“Bucky, please.” The words come out hoarse and broken and desperate. Like his vocal chords are ripping themselves apart. And it sure as shit feels like it, the ache in his throat deepening a little more with every passing second. “Please,” he chokes.

And he half expects a chill to creep into the air, for the lights to start flickering, for a cracked pill bottle to roll ominously across the floor. But there’s nothing else after that.

He sits in the middle of the bathroom floor all night anyway, waiting.

He'll wait forever if he has to. 


	5. Peppermint

The universe feels something a little like hope. It’s working, this thing more powerful than the stones. This thing that churns deep at the core of all things, spinning and burning eternal.

Bucky is still nothing and the void is still the void, and he’s floating and drifting and _aching_ for Steve.

But he’s somewhere else too. Somewhere real that smells like hot steam and the city. He and Steve are sixteen and seventeen respectively, sharing a peppermint stick and enjoying the barely-there breeze coming in through the open window. There’s a dance that night at the school gym. Bucky managed to get each of them dates by promising both Miller sisters a turn around the dance floor if one of them would go with Steve. He doesn’t tell Steve that, though.

_“Buck, you know somewhere between asthma and a crooked spine is two left feet, right?” Steve asks, a little smile playing on his lips. Something about that smile makes Bucky feel funny. More accurately, something about it has been making him feel funny long enough that he’s already had time to go through the whole emotional rollercoaster from denial to acceptance._ _Bucky remembers walking home from school once behind Betty Jean Cartwright when she tripped on the sidewalk and her entire skirt flew up above her knees. There'd been swaths of exposed skin that made Bucky's whole body feel overly warm, before he tore his eyes away and offered his hand blindly. Steve Rogers makes him feel a lot like that, even tucked into slacks and a slightly-too-large jacket. Steve Rogers makes him feel a lot of things._

_“It’s easy, Steve. Hell, they’re just dames. You can just sway, you know? Lots of folks just sway.”_

_Bucky passes the last little nub of candy over to Steve and licks sweet mint off his lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Steve toss it into his mouth like popcorn._

_“I guess, Buck.”_

_Bucky doesn’t know what makes him say the next thing, or maybe he does, but it comes out before he can think too hard on it. And once it’s out, he can’t take it back._

_“I could give you a lesson, I guess.” Bucky shrugs, casually scratching at the back of his neck. But Steve doesn’t even blink, doesn’t even stop to consider it weird. He can be a huge idiot sometimes (Bucky’s idiot, and God help anyone else who dared to call him that), but other times, he’s just a teenager like everybody else—eager to prove something and not make a fool of himself in front of a pretty girl._

_“That’d be great, Buck.”_

_Mrs. Rogers is gone, working extra for the past few days on account of some big accident at a construction site. It’s just them and Miss Billie Holiday. A quiet crackle and soft music. Steve standing in the middle of the tiny apartment staring at his own shoes. The way he's contemplating his feet almost seems prayerful, like he's begging them to cooperate for once._

_Bucky’s never wanted him more._

_Bucky crowds closer, giving Steve a little smile and nodding his head. There’s an awkward moment where they fumble with their hands—Steve may have all the grace of a newborn foal, but he knows where his hands are supposed to be as the lead. Bucky’s try to go there too by default, their arms crashing together with a little jolt and a pair of nervous laughs._

_For one fleeting second, Bucky wants to grab Steve's wrists and lead after all. He imagines moving them around the few feet of empty space and just reveling (secretly, selfishly) in the closeness of him. But he can't do that. He has to be patient, has to pull all those cards right up against his chest and never show anyone, least of all Steve. He tucks his right arm under Steve's left shoulder blade instead, feels Steve mirror the action, the warmth of his hand bleeding through Bucky's shirt_ — _humid and clammy and real._

_“Alright, step off with your left-oomph-other left, Stevie.” Bucky’s smiling. His toe is throbbing and he’s smiling. Billie Holiday's voice finally cuts in._

> _Your eyes of blue, your kisses too,  
>  I never knew what they could do. _

_“Just watch my feet and follow them around with yours,” he says, and Steve leans his head down, back bowing slightly, his forehead fitting right under Bucky’s chin to press against his clavicle. They’re dancing closer, much closer, than any school dance would allow. And Bucky’s stomach is dropping like he’s riding a coaster at Coney Island. He can feel Steve's breath against his chest._

> __And after all is said and done,_  
>  _It looks like I’m the lucky one._ _

_“I think I’m actually getting it, Buck.”_

_He isn’t. And Bucky’s pretty sure he’s somehow still leading even though he’s not._

_“Yeah you are, Stevie. Melba won’t know what hit her.” Another circle around the room. The song ends and Bucky doesn't even let go to start it over, just dances them close enough to the record player to move the needle. The piano sings out anew, and hands migrate until they’re just holding each other, chest to chest, arms clasped tightly around each others’ middles. Steve’s forehead presses against Bucky's shoulder, but he's still looking down, still watching their feet, still trying to learn like they’re doing this right._

_“What if she wants to kiss, Buck?” he asks, quietly panicked, like the thought just occurred to him now that he’s gotten one fear out of the way._

_“Then you kiss her, pal.”_

_“Have you ever?”_

_Bucky almost lies, but then he doesn’t. He doesn't have to. It's Steve._

_“No,” Bucky says. “Hey, maybe tonight.”_

_“Think it’s hard?”_

_“Just gotta put your lips in the right place, don’t ya?” Bucky risks a tip of his head, an inhale of Steve’s hair. It smells like Ivory soap. His stomach does another drop. “You’ve got me all curious now though.”_

_“Curious about what?”_

_“About what it’d be like to kiss a dame. Maybe we...” He can’t get any further than that. Than the almost-suggestion that the two of them should kiss for some kind of scientific research._

_Observation: having you this close makes me feel like we’re down by one in the last inning of World Series, and I’m up to bat. Hypothesis: I’d probably like kissing you more than any lady even if they are pretty neat. Experiment: Well, we probably shouldn’t._

_“Maybe we what, Buck?”_

_“Nothin, Stevie, don’t worry about it.”_

_“Like you teaching me to dance, you mean? Except…”_

_Tingles explode up Bucky’s spine before feathering down to his fingertips. Even with only one good ear, he thinks Steve can probably hear his heart pounding. Say something, Barnes, you big dumb moron._

_“If you…” Bucky swallows._

_“I…”_

_Steve finally looks up from the floor. More tingles, like it's Steve's birthday but the fireworks are bursting in his veins. They aren’t dancing anymore. Steve nods once._

> _Your eyes of blue, your kisses too._

_Bucky moves his hands up, slowly, tentatively, placing them on either side of Steve’s face. He's imagined this dozens of times, imagined the two of them rapped on knuckles for holding hands under the lunch table, imagined a house and a white picket fence with shelves of books and Steve's drawings littering the walls. All things that could never happen, but yet here he is with Steve's soft, bony cheeks under his palms._

> _I never knew what they could do._

_Steve’s eyelids flutter shut, long lashes stark against his skin. With his heart an earthquake in his rib cage, Bucky leans in and softly presses their lips together. And he can’t keep his cool, despite how much he’s been trying to play off the whole afternoon as some kind of teaching experience turned trial run. At the last second, Bucky tries to catch the small desperate sound that worms its way up the back of his throat. But he chokes on it instead. Audibly, obviously._

_Steve should haul back and punch him for it, should kick him out and never speak to him again. But instead he melts in his arms and tangles a fist in Bucky’s hair, making a small desperate sound of his own. One finished kiss, then another, then another still. All flavored with peppermint and the buzz of quiet longing_.

> _I can’t believe that you’re in love with me._

_Both of them get kisses at the dance. Both of them lie and say they were their firsts._

Somewhere elsewhere, somewhere nowhere, Bucky can almost feel his lips tingling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Important musical accompaniment.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feLe1TeBD1Q)
> 
>  
> 
> Also, fully sure that Steve's "first kiss" was actually not from his reluctant date. I have some thoughts on this, but they didn't really fit. lol


	6. Constellations

Steve wakes up on the bathroom floor surrounded by scattered pills and shards of glass. The first thing he does is look in every single one, dismayed to find only one pair of blue eyes.

Even more dismayed to realize that he’s been humming Billie Holiday the entire time. Not just any Billie Holiday though. He swears he still remembers what it felt like to trod on Bucky's toes, to have his hands cradling his jaw, to taste the lingering peppermint. Steve's then-weak heart had fluttered so fast he'd been the littlest bit afraid it might finally give. If it had, it would've been worth it. 

They were just idiots in love then—young love, still vague in form like seeping watercolors. An incomplete sketch waiting for years of life together to fill in the details. But love nonetheless. Raw and wanting. 

Decades later, they’d laugh about it, about how both of them had pined endlessly. They’d tried to push it away. They'd gone on dates with ladies who were nice and likable enough and even fun to be alone with. Wasted efforts in the end, because no one else had ever come close, not really. Peggy had come the closest, and Steve would never deny that he loved her fully and wholeheartedly, that in another life he probably married her and had 2.5 kids. 

But he'd also never deny that if he and Bucky could've been together from the beginning, he never would have looked twice. 

“ _It was always gonna be you, Stevie. I knew that once. Shouldn't have doubted it, not ever.” A confession in the middle of the night, both of them side by side on a blanket under the stars in Wakanda, fingers twined like climbing vines. Bucky’s been teaching him the new constellations. The southern cross, carina, chameleon. Wakanda has their own too. The flower, the rhino, queen mother._

“ _Yeah, well how we were to know we’d survive the war and both end up now, where two men can hold hands on Bogart without anyone looking twice?”_

“ _And here I always told you I didn’t believe in fate.”_

“ _What’s that constellation there, Buck?” Steve asks, pointing at a cluster of stars that feels like it has to be something._

“ _Oh that one? That one’s called the shield bearer and he’s a huge asshole who never listens to his boyfriend.”_

The labs are finally clean when Steve walks through. Cleaner anyway, the glass swept away and all the disarray put into some kind of order. Not perfect, but better.

The first thing he wants to do is talk to Shuri. He makes a beeline for her instead of food, hope thick and thrumming through his veins.

“Shuri.” His voice sounds a little less strained. Maybe it’s warm from all the humming. Or from a night of silent prayers to a man he hopes still exists despite all odds. He reminds himself that they've faced those odds before, that they've thrown the dice anyway every single time. Bucky is a gamble Steve's always willing to take. 

“Steve.”  

“I have a question,” he starts. “It might sound kind of odd.”

Not long ago, he would’ve gotten a smile. _There are no odd questions in science, Steve._ But the light that usually shines so bright in her eyes is as dull as frosted glass. 

“Yes?” she asks.

“Have you…” And now that he’s trying to say it out loud, it feels even more ridiculous. But the need to know outweighs anything else. “Have you gotten the feeling that maybe he’s not gone after all?”

Her eyes flash to his immediately, locking on them with unparalleled intensity. A tiny spark of light reignites, an ember glowing red. And he doesn’t need her to answer, because that’s answer enough.

“You saw T’Challa too?” she asks, her voice quiet. And Steve feels like he’s been knocked off his feet. “I thought I was going mad.”

“I didn’t,” Steve says, “not T’Challa.” 

“Then who are you talking about?” she asks, face fallen. 

“Bucky,” he says. “I saw Bucky.”

Shuri’s eyebrows knit together, her forehead creasing the way it does in her lab when she’s trying to solve a problem. She’s working something out, her mind flying down paths other minds could never even fathom. He waits patiently for her to get where she's going. 

“Okoye,” she finally says, and the woman steps closer, spear following smoothly like another limb.  

“Yes, my queen?”

“Stop that,” Shuri says. “And I need to ask you something, something you might not want to answer.”

“Of course.”

“Have you seen Ayo?” Shuri asks, and Steve watches a ripple of pain travel across Okoye’s face, like a heavy stone dropped into a pond. “Since the event?”

Steve swears he can feel the silence suffocating them both while Okoye processes the question. A glance at Steve. Her hand twists a little on the spear, worrying at the vibranium. Her knuckles pale. 

“I thought I heard her,” she says. “This morning, calling to me." 

Shuri looks back at Steve and stands up immediately, hand automatically moving to clutch the panther necklace, thumb stroking over one of the triangles. When she speaks again, she actually sounds like the queen she's unwillingly become. 

“Okoye, have the other Dora ask around and see if anyone else has had visitors. I’ll be in my lab.” She’s gone in a flash after that, another guard falling in behind her at Okoye’s signal. Steve follows them both out. 

“I can help,” he says, “if that’s okay with you.”

Shrui glances back at him. 

“You can start by calling your friends. Ask them the same question."  Another glance, a slight frown. "And eat something, please.”

He hums his assent. He can certainly try.

* * *

The void has life now, though not of its own accord. It’s found in little flashes of the other place. The place where he sang old Brooklyn sidewalk rhymes to children and helped build the future with his own hands and made love to Steve Rogers again and again, because no amount could ever be enough. Each flash is so vibrant compared with nothing that it’s like being blinded by the sun.

And there’s Steve. Even with only his back and a sliver of his face visible, Bucky knows him. He's wearing Bucky's clothes, cell phone to his ear. The faint sound of the other line ringing filters out of the speaker.   
  
Bucky wonders…   
   if he just focuses…   
      if he concentrates…   
         with all he is and all he ever…

“ _Hey Stevie,”_ he says, a test. A successful one, it seems, as Steve’s whole body snaps rigid.

“ _Bucky,”_ Steve breathes, clutching the phone tighter.

And hell, even if it sounds like a television on the fritz, what a thing to hear that voice again in something other than memories.

“ _I’m gonna get back. Somehow.”_

Steve nods. 

“ _I know you will, Buck,” he_  says. _“It’s who we are.”_

Damn right, it is. War couldn’t keep them apart and death couldn’t either. Whatever this is, they'll smash right through it too. 

“ _Fuck if I’ll let some plum-colored asshole tell me where the end of the line is, sweetheart.”_

A laugh, a genuine Steve Rogers laugh. Frayed at the edges, but a laugh, a fucking laugh. If Bucky had a heart, it'd be racing away. 

“ _You know I hate it when you call me that,”_ Steve says.

“ _I know you claim to_ _.”_

And Bucky can’t control the angle of the scene no matter how much he wills it to shift. But he can see the right corner of Steve’s mouth twitch up. Soon, he's gonna plant a kiss right there. Then another, then another. He'll put a thousand kisses on that mouth, a million on every inch of Steve's skin. Infinite love notes that still won't be enough. Their passion is a hunger that can never be satisfied, but oh do they try and try and try. 

The void takes him back again before he can think to ask Steve to just turn his face. Next time though. Next time, he will.

_Next time,_ the universe agrees. 


	7. Intrinsic

Steve almost crushes the cell phone in his hand. Each garbled word in Bucky’s voice has him squeezing it tighter tighter, and if Shuri hadn’t designed it to survive half the weapons in her lab (literally—Bucky had spent a whole day shooting at the prototypes), he very well might be sitting there with a handful of dust.

He’s already talked to Nat, who sounded like hell but confirmed that yes, she thought she was losing her mind, but she’s been seeing Sam. _Sam_. Steve wishes he could see him too, but maybe that’s not how it works. 

Soon though. Something in him can feel it, hope blossoming like cherry trees in the spring, raining down petal-soft to soothe the deep ache inside of him. Whatever happened, they aren't gone, and that's something. 

He goes to the lab before making any other phone calls. He doesn’t know if whatever’s happening can be pushed along by Shuri, but if it can, she needs to know about it.

“Nat’s been seeing Sam,” he says, stepping off the ramp.

“What were they to each other?” Shuri asks. She’s already writing frantically on a screen. Drawing lines between people with a stylus. He follows the red line between him and Bucky. So much hanging on a single thread of pixelated ink. On three other screens, images move by so fast he doesn't see them until one pops up. A shot of two tweets threaded together.  

> Britney Farber @itsbritneyyy know it seems crazy but i keep hearing my girlfriend. she turned in my arms, so i know she... any1 else? #themissing  
> 203 replies, 14k retweets, 21k likes
> 
> D'kevion White @dwhite08 @itsbritneyyy You aren't crazy. Turned on the TV this morning and my daddy was there looking back at me. There's more going on here than we realize. @tonystarkandtheavengers if there are any of y'all left, figure this out. Plz.   
> 12 replies, 5k retweets, 12k likes

Steve tears his eyes away, heart thumping out a beat in his throat. He's supposed to be answering a question. Shuri keeps writing, but she gives him a brief look that says _hurry it up already_. 

“Uh, Nat's not much for labels, but they were more than friends,” he says. Sam had mentioned once that he’d never thought he could come back from losing Riley, that he never thought he’d find another person who would take him as he was without demanding more than he could give. He hadn’t elaborated and Steve hadn’t asked. But he had seen the way Sam grinned when Nat walked into a room, the way they quietly held hands when they shared the backseat of a stolen car. 

“Anyone else?” Shuri asks.   
  
“I haven’t talked to anyone else yet.” He glances down at the phone, still gripped tightly in his hand. “The next call never went through. Bucky was on the line instead.”

“What?” A small clatter as the stylus slips and tumbles to the floor, trailing pixels off the “t” in Natasha. The Dora nearby jumps and then settles. Shuri whips around and fixes on him. “Why did you not lead with that information, Steven?”

“I…”

A huff. She picks up the stylus and tucks it behind her ear, crossing over to a work table.

“What did he say?” she asks, picking up wires and boards and examining them piece by piece. She motions for Steve to come over and starts loading up his arms with the things that make the cut. "Did he talk about where he is?" 

Steve gives her the gist of it. His voice only cracks once.

* * *

Wakanda. Oh fuck, he loves Wakanda, almost as much as he loves Steve.

It's like all the sci-fi pulps of his childhood come to life, but better. Better because he was allowed to live there in the future and be a part of it too. Better because as grand as the imaginations of his favorite writers were, they couldn't compete with Shuri on her worst day. 

“ _You’re soldering that wrong, Bucky. Let me show you.” Somedays she sees him as a pet project; other days as a pet nuisance. He loves her like one of his own sisters, and if anyone ever laid a hand on her, he’d rip it clean off. If she left anything behind for him to work with when she was done, that is._

“ _What?” It’s how Morita taught him back in the war, just in case they ever lost him and someone else needed to fix the busted radios._

“ _That’s what you do for a quick fix, not for something you want to last.”_

_Well, that makes sense._

_She shows him how to fix his mistake, and he redoes the board he’s been working on. Every other day, she lends him a new book on circuitry or physics or space or programming. Some are published works from men like Hawking and Tyson and Turing. Others are homemade tomes on the properties of vibranium, some by her and some by those before her._

_He soaks it all up. He helps test her weapons and her experiments, Steve sometimes watching in the periphery, smiling at Bucky’s childlike joy and sketching away. Christ, he really does love it there, maybe even more than home sweet Brooklyn. And he tries to contribute as much as he can between the lab and the goats. Because he knows he doesn’t deserve to live somewhere that makes him so happy after everything he’s done._

It calls to him now, home. Pulsing and magnetic. There’s Steve in the lab, writing something on a screen. Names and lines. Bucky finds one pair in particular.

_Bucky—Steve._

As it always should be.

Pulling. Something is pulling him there. It's like electricity surging and bubbling around him. And he swears for the first time since he fell apart, he feels like he has form again. 

There’s a window. Sort of. Viscous and moving, but a window nonetheless. A window tugging at him while it throws off wave upon wave of energy. And there’s Shuri, frantically throwing parts together, her lips twitching the way they do when she's doing calculations in her head. 

Steve looks up from the board, right at him, and freezes for a heartbeat. Then he crosses the whole lab in what seems like three steps, skidding to a stop in front of him. Even with an orange tint cast over his skin and hair and eyes, he's still the most beautiful thing Bucky has ever seen. 

“Bucky?” Steve’s palm hovers on the other side of the window. Bucky reaches for it. And yes, Bucky does have some kind of form after all—the vaguest shadow of a hand trying its damnedest to touch what it loves most.

Shuri’s watching now, intently. Of course she would figure it out. Of course she would make something to connect the void with reality, to make the void not a void but a real place that can therefore be tied to another.

Fuck, he’s so proud.

“Don’t touch it, Steven,” she warns.

“But if it’s…”

“Steve,” Bucky says, realizing if he can hear them, then the same must be true.

“Oh God, _Bucky._ ” Steve’s hands hover right over the liquid glass, and Bucky can feel him. Close—Steve is so close. And the line between them is like the line on the screen, thick and real, but even more concrete. It's intrinsic, like mass and energy. They are a fundamental law of the universe. 

He smiles. Steve smiles back. 

And that’s when he shatters. Back, back, back into the void that is no longer a void but a place. A place.

He hears Steve yell his name before the whispers come again. 

I'll be back, Stevie. Don't you worry your pretty face about that, sweetheart. 


	8. Observation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this one. It's a tough chapter, and it didn't want to cooperate on the editing at all. 
> 
> Again, this whole story is written, just unedited. So no worries on it going unfinished.

“At least we know it works,” Shuri says, hand hovering like she wants to pat him reassuringly but isn't sure where or how.

Steve tasks himself with trying to calm down, deep breaths in and out, nostrils flaring. The shadow had only been a shadow, but it was still Bucky. Still his voice and his consciousness and the very soul that makes Steve's whole being hum. 

And he had to watch him disappear. Again. 

Not forever though. He knows that now. He can feel it in his bones, just like he can feel Bucky somewhere on the other side of the field. Infinitely far away but so, so close. 

The lab is quiet for a while, Steve returning to his task of populating the screens with names and lines, and Shuri working on stabilizing the energy field she created. She doesn’t understand where Bucky and the others are or why any more than he does, but that hardly even slows her down. 

“This part should work like an antenna,” she says. “A strong one, much stronger than your cell phone. And if they need energy to draw from, the vibranium field should provide it.”

It’s all a bunch of guesses cobbled together into something, but it works. And now she’s trying to make it better. 

T’Challa comes in the mid-afternoon as another shadow, and she dissolves into tears when he says her name. 

When he’s gone again just like Bucky, she leaves the lab for a few minutes before coming back and working well into the early morning.

* * *

The void is a place now and that means everything in it must exist in new ways. Bit by bit, Bucky can feel himself becoming Bucky again. The slow increase of weight on his left side, the slow awareness of feeling crackling through his being. Still no light, but he holds his hand up in front of his face anyway, wondering how much of it there really is.

He remembers Steve doing this once when he nearly died, just holding his hand up in front of his face to make sure he was still real.

“ _Buck.” A hoarse whisper in the middle of the night. Bucky’s staying at the Rogers place, keeping a silent vigil so Mrs. Rogers can keep food on the table. Steve’s been sleeping upright, leaning back against him. It’s easier for him to breathe that way and harder for him to choke on his own coughs._

_They’re months past the kiss now. Past more stolen, furtive moments. Bucky softly presses his lips into a crown of blonde hair. Steve is way, way too warm._

“ _I’m here, Stevie.” I’ll never be anywhere else._

“ _Ca-” A violent coughing fit, shaking them both, and then Steve’s wheezing—raw and desperate for air. And if Bucky could trade places with him, he’d do it in an instant. Hell, if he could give him one fucking afternoon without pain, he’d trade his entire existence._

“ _Breathe. Concentrate on this right here, and try to breathe.” Bucky’s hand splays gently across his chest, grateful for every hard-fought rise and fall. He’s already making a mental list for after this—see what Steve needed in the first place, get some aspirin in him before his body burns him out of it. But right now, all the matters is that Steve keeps breathing. In and out. In. And out._

_And Steve tries so hard, but he can’t seem to catch his breath. He’s hacking again, wheezing between, and Bucky grabs the water on the bedside table. Together, they do their best to tip some into his mouth. Anything to stop the onslaught._

_Bucky wants to do more, but of course Steve is allergic to cough medicine of all fucking things. Bucky’s ma has said more than a few times that the Almighty must have some really strong plans for Steve Rogers to put him through so much, and damn’t he hopes that’s true._

_Steve finally manages to stop long enough to get some aspirin down, and Bucky holds him all night, helping him breathe and live, and please God, don't stop living on me, Stevie._

_Mrs. Rogers finds them like that in the morning, Steve dozing on Bucky's chest, and Bucky clutching him so desperately that she has to know._

_She doesn’t say a word._

With a sound a lot like an ocean wave breaking on sandy shores, Bucky realizes he’s breathing. The void is not a void anymore, and he is breathing it in and it smells like home.

* * *

By noon the following day, every screen in the lab is covered in names and lines. The first board is nearly solid with Wakandans and the remaining Avengers. The others are populated by Shuri's AI, pulling names from social media, news, and police reports worldwide. Color-coded pixels stand in for the threads that once held the universe together. Steve stares at them all, hoping that everyone left behind knows what they do, that their pain is that much more bearable for it. 

“There,” Shuri says, stepping back with a soldering iron in one hand and a stylus tucked behind her ear. “That should be stable enough.”

“Enough for what?” Steve asks, his mind already going a million places.

“To not kill you if you touch it. To not do whatever it does to them when they touch it.”

“Now what?” he asks, already knowing the answer. His favorite command to disobey: wait.

“I’m going to try to take some readings, but otherwise…”

“Yeah.” He grabs a stool and twirls it around, sinking into it.

“Give me a memory?” Shuri asks, moving around the lab and gathering up more and more equipment until he’s sure it’s all going to tumble out of her arms. “Of Bucky."

He thinks of peppermint and shuffling feet almost instantly. The art museum and Bucky watching Steve's reactions more than he looked at the paintings. Coney Island and Bucky's laughter and Steve hurling with a strong hand rubbing circles on his back. Lazy afternoons on the fire escape sharing candy or a Coca-Cola. 

He thinks of sleeping back-to-back in foxholes, their feet tangling together in the night. How feeling Bucky's lungs inflate, deflate had been the only way he could sleep during the war.

Balmy, starry nights in Wakanda and the way Bucky's scars felt beneath his lips.

She wants one memory, and he has a lifetime. He picks the next one that comes. 

“You know, Bucky never liked fighting. I think he only ever did it for me, even though he got really good at it,” Steve says. “He enlisted because he knew if he didn’t, they’d draft him anyway. Said he didn’t have much choice either way, but he still wanted to make one. Didn't wanna go though, never did. I was the one itching to get over and fight. Bucky said I was being an idiot, and I’m not sure he wasn’t right.”

Shuri works while he speaks, probing instruments at the field and creasing her eyebrows at whatever the readouts say.

“The night before he left for training, he says, ‘let’s take a walk, Stevie, just you and me.’ Bucky and I, there’d been something for a long time, but we couldn’t exactly… We never thought what we were to each other was wrong. After a while, it felt too right to be anything but, but it was like we had some kind of understanding that it could never work, that he’d get married and have a bunch of Barnes babies, that maybe I’d survive long enough to do the same or at least be the best uncle any kid’s ever had.”

Something beeps loudly and Shuri tells him to keep talking.

“So we go for this walk, and Bucky’s talking, just talking. Little things at first about the Dodgers or how Rita Halford got a new dress or how he hopes he gets stuck with good guys at training. Just Bucky being Bucky. So, there was a place in our old neighborhood everyone called ‘the Devil's Alley.’ Real dark, the kind of place that people made up stories about. It was allegedly haunted, or there'd been a murder _just last year_ , or if you said the name 'Sally O'Neal' three times... Of course, we'd walked through it hundreds of times, because it was usually between us and where we wanted to go. Never saw any ghosts there, never saw a murder either.”

Shuri takes notes on a holographic tablet projected from her kimoyo beads. She glances his way occasionally to let him know she’s still listening.

“This night, he grabbed my hand the second we turned the corner. Just took it and held it like he thought it might be the last time,” Steve says. “I said, ‘what, Buck, you think you’re gonna die in Jersey?’ I expected him to say something back, something funny and light, maybe about how he'd rather die than even go to Jersey, but he didn’t. He looked at me and said, ‘I’ve just never been away from you for that long. Not sure I’m gonna like it much.’”

He leaves out the way Bucky squeezed his hand before he spoke. He omits the part where he practically threw his arms around him and kissed him, the part where Bucky pushed him up against the bricks and mouthed at him so fiercely it burned. She doesn't need to know that. Just that Bucky loved him, even then, and he'd felt the same. That's all people ever need to know. 

“He wrote me every single day he was in training, sometimes just a few words, but every day. I never deserved him, you know? Not once in my whole life.” Steve shakes his head. Bucky Barnes should’ve taken one look at that scrawny punk kid who'd just had his ass handed to him and walked away. But he didn’t. And God if Steve ever had the strength to try and make him, serum or not.

“You know he says the same about you when you aren’t around,” Shuri says.

“Yeah, well.” Steve shrugs. “What’s one of yours? Of T’Challa?”

She turns back and smiles at Steve.

“There was a dinner when I was thirteen. Some political thing out of the city.” She closes the hologram momentarily and pulls up some kind of schematic. “It was boring and I don’t really remember anything except that he drove us, and on the way back I begged for him to let me drive.”

A quiet mechanical hum, and Shuri cocks her head.

“After an hour of me begging, he finally gave in, pulled the car off into an open field. It was the usual stuff after that, first time driver who kept trying to hit the gas and brakes at the same time.  He tried to stay calm. 'Shuri you have to shift, Shuri watch out for-'” She laughs. “I hit a tree. Of course, I was only going about 30 kilometers per hour so even the car was fine, thank Bast, but I hit it. There was a big dip I couldn’t see because of the grass, and we just sort of tipped into it and then,” she shrugs, “boom, tree. I thought T’Challa was going to have a heart attack.”

Another beep. She spins the schematic with the wave of her finger.

“He sat there, frozen—go figure—his eyes all wide like he'd seen the ancestral plane. The car is halfway in this hole, and I just wait, staring at him. Then he starts laughing, quietly at first until his whole body shook. And I start laughing too. We couldn’t stop for the longest time. Then he turns to me, tears in his eyes, and says very seriously, ‘Shuri, do not tell mother.’”

A whole childhood of ‘Stevie, don’t you dare tell my ma about this’ comes rushing back, and he smiles fondly.

“How’d you get the car out of the ditch?” he asks.

“Oh that,” Shuri says. “That was easy. Physics.”

Like it’s the simplest thing in the world.

“I miss him terribly,” she says, voice betraying the slightest break.

“I know.” God, he knows.

Silence falls over the lab again after that, save the sounds of Shuri’s equipment and the low hum of the machine’s energy. It stays that way too, neither of them speaking again until-

“Bucky.” Steve’s off the stool in seconds. He can tell it’s him this time. He’s more there than before, an impressionist painting instead of a formless silhouette. Steve would know the shape of him anywhere. He probably knows Bucky’s body better than his own.

“ _Steve_.” Blurry hands press against the field, and Steve puts his up to match, nervously touching and hoping Shuri was right about the stability. They’re almost touching, and that fact alone is both a triumph and a torment. “Steve, remember the day we met?”

Steve lets out a sound that has no name of its own. It’s part laugh and part sob, charged with emotion that makes the field buzz. Vaguely, he registers that Shuri’s standing behind him.

“Of course I remember, Buck.”

_The late spring of ‘28. Steve had nearly died a few months before that, and the thought had haunted him more than once. Dying without meeting Bucky Barnes. All the tragedies he’d endured, and he couldn’t fathom a bigger one._

_But he’d been better then save the usual (which was decidedly not better by anyone else’s rubric), and it was like he’d saved up energy through the sickness, his body ready to raise hell if he found any. And he had in the form of Mike Callahan throwing rocks at a frightened dog in an alley. Callahan had missed every shot, scaring the poor thing more than anything else, but Steve still couldn’t abide the cruel laughter or the way it cowered, tail tucked between trembling legs._

“ _Hey, what’d that poor dog ever do to you, Callahan?” he’d asked._

_Callahan fought dirty, cradling the same rocks in his hands while he threw punches. And Steve, well Steve kept getting back up, even when he had to claw up the wall to do it. Over and over until he just couldn’t. But it was alright. The dog was long gone. Safe somewhere else. Callahan left him in a pile of trash, bleeding and aching all over._

_It was Bucky who found him and shook him awake._

“ _Hey, you alright, pal? Because you look like shit.”_

_Steve had tried to quip something back, but all he could do was groan, so Bucky walked him the two blocks to the Barnes’s brownstone where his ma fretted over Steve like he was her son._

_The rest was, literally, history._

“I never told you,” Bucky says, and Steve swears he can actually make out the blue-gray of his eyes even through the purple-orange glow of the machine. He presses against the field, testing it, wondering what would happen if he threw a punch and attempted to break it apart, to pull the man on the other side back into his arms.

“You never told me what, Buck?”

“Two weeks after that, I socked Callahan so hard in the jaw, he lost his last baby tooth,” Bucky says. “I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought it then. ‘That’s for Steve.’”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Steve says, but there’s no bite behind it.

“He had it comin,” Bucky says. “And you’ve thrown harder punches for me.”

“I would tear the world apart for you, Buck.” He would tear apart the lines between worlds if he damn well knew how. 

“I know, Stevie,” Bucky says. “And I would stand in the middle of the goddamn rubble with your hand in mine.”

“We’re gonna get you home,” Steve says. “And then I’m laying it down. The shield. Just you and me, maybe here if they’ll have us. Maybe Brooklyn. But you and me, pal. No more war. No more watching you-.”

“If anyone can fix it, it’s Shuri,” Bucky says. “Even if she’s being a complete creep right now.”

“Bucky,” she says, stepping forward from behind Steve. “Is… can you see others where you are? T’Challa is...”

The half-formed body of Bucky Barnes shakes his head.

“Not exactly,” he says. “I know they’re there, and I can hear them. But it’s like we’re all in our own space. You changed things though.”

“Did I?” she asks.

“This.” His hands move around, gesturing at the field. “It’s like it made everything here more real. Me, I was nothing but thoughts and they were all in pieces. God it was like being back in that goddamn chair—of course I didn’t know that it was like that until after. At first, it was just Steve. All I could think was Stevie, Steve, Steve. I love you, you punk. So much. But then Shuri, you built that, and now, I’m almost...again.”

“And that all happened after?” she asks.

“Well, it happened when I started seeing Steve, there in Wakanda, getting memories back. A little here, a little there, a little more me. But this seemed like it sped it all up,” Bucky says. "Time ain't exactly right here." 

“You think us observing wherever you are is changing it?” She furrows her brow.

“Yeah, maybe,” he says. “Your guess is as good as mine. Better, really. I’m so goddamn proud of you for all of this, you know that?”

Steve smiles at that. He sounds just like the old Bucky, decades and decades ago, his hand on Rebecca’s shoulder after she skinned her knees insisting on playing stickball with the boys.

“ _Don’t think I’ve seen pros who could slide into home like that, Becca. I’m the proudest big brother in Brooklyn today. We won't tell ma how it happened.”_

“Then we’ll observe it more,” she says. “So much of this doesn’t make sense, but we can try it.”

“If I do see him around,” Bucky says. “I’ll say hi for you.”

“He’s been here too,” she says. “A lot of you have.”

“Who’s there and who’s here?”

“Sam is. I haven’t seen him,” Steve says. “Nat has.”

“He m-”

It’s so abrupt it doesn’t feel like it should have happened. A blink and Bucky’s gone, like he was never there. Steve pushes back the pain that immediately claws into his heart, focusing instead on how Bucky had said his name. 

And he can almost hear him, repeating "Steve" over and over, the only thought he had at first when he had no thoughts and no nothing.

And if anything happened to Steve, he knows it would be the same for him, that he’d have Bucky’s name on his lips no matter what.

He turns around takes his place on the stool, offers Shuri anything she needs as always, and waits. 

Shuri starts building more fields.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Given what was usually in cough syrup in those days, I'm not entirely sure it's a bad thing that Steve was allergic. 
> 
> Remember to kudos/comment/subscribe/bookmark if you like this. It means a lot. <3


	9. Orange and Blue

The void is edged with orange. Becoming aware of it is like watching the sun rise. The nothingness slowly shifts into something, vibrant color bleeding in from all sides. Bucky's surrounded by it, and he can’t help but think of the vivid morning and evening skies in Wakanda. Of Steve there when he woke up again, hand slotted with his, the golden morning already warming their world-weary bones.

They’d kissed in the grass. Kissed like they used to when they were young, older, older still. Like they did in two separate shabby Brooklyn apartments when no one else could see. Like they did in the middle of the war, huddled close while the other Commandos slept. Like they did on a plane bound for a place Bucky never wanted to see again, with half of Steve’s friends out to get them both and Steve fighting like hell to save him (again). Like they did before Bucky let someone freeze him for the— _please God let it be the_ —last time.

Bucky’s still floating, but not in nothing. He’s aware of the dampness bleeding through his clothes, of the viscosity holding him aloft, his almost-body bobbing up and down on gentle waves. There’s shore nearby, and Bucky finds it, standing for the first time in eons or in never. The ocean is a bright aqua blue that contrasts sharply with its sky. It should be impossible, but there it is, stretching on before him. Blue against orange, infinite. 

It’s beautiful, this strange somewhere that holds him prisoner. Stevie’s pencils would make it real. If they’d been lucky enough to end up there together, maybe he’d have even been willing to stay. An eternity with Steve in this other place would be a hell of a lot of kisses.

But there is no Steve and he doesn’t know where to look for Shuri’s window, and so all he can do is wait until he ends up back there on his own. He sits in sand the color of rust and stares at sharp line of the horizon, thinks of a thousand touches and Steve gasping his name in the night.

He doesn’t expect to see the ocean move, to see people emerge from it one by one, all of them a little muddled just like he is. So many he doesn’t recognize. So many who walk on past him, confused and exploring. Others also sit in the sand. Some don’t even leave the water.

“Bucky.” T’Challa sits down next to him, the lines of the panther costume still a bit frayed. 

“Oh, great, it’s you.” Sam plops down on his right. His wingpack straps look like flower petals, thin and delicate. He slings an arm around Bucky’s shoulder. “You’ve seen Steve, right? I didn’t know which of you was here, but I knew exactly where you’d both go.”

“He misses you for some reason,” Bucky says. “I saw Shuri too. Steve was in the lab.”

“I saw. You think this was her?” T’Challa asks, gesturing at the beach and all the souls on it.

“I don’t think it could be anyone else,” Bucky says. “She had a theory. Said she was gonna test it, and now this. Your sister could rule the world in a week if she wanted to. We’re lucky she’s a nice gal.”

“You keep flattering her like that, and she might try it.” T’Challa smiles and nudges him with his elbow. 

“Oh crap, metal arm guy," someone says, words flowing together rapidly. "Can I sit here, you guys, or would that be weird? I mean, I know we fought that one time, but that was a while back, huh?”

Bucky looks up. It’s the spider kid, scratching at the back of his neck nervously. 

“Sit down, Peter,” T’Challa says. “You are among friends.”

Peter lowers himself into the sand and hugs his knees close.

“You alright, kid?” Bucky asks.

“I just wanna go home. Aunt May is- and Mr. Stark, I don’t know if he’s- I told him I was sorry.”

Next to him, Sam lets out a little noise. Bucky bristles too, skin pricking hot from head to toe. He’d forgiven Tony for trying to kill him given the circumstances (maybe not so much for hurting Steve, but bygones and all that shit).

But bringing that poor kid into the middle of a battle that had nothing to do with him just to even out his roster? Bucky still owed Stark Jr. a swift kick in the pants for that particular move. 

Peter doesn’t need to hear any of that though. It won’t help.

“I don’t think he’s here,” Bucky says. “And wherever he is, he’s not mad at you, kid.”

That much has to be true anyway. Even Tony’s not that much of an asshole.

“He’s right,” Sam says. “He’s probably worried about you, but he’s not mad.”  
  
Sam flicks his eyes toward Bucky, a quick look that seems to say, ' _And if he is, then he's an even bigger dick than we thought, which is saying something.'_

“I just want to go home,” Peter repeats, staring back out over the water.

“We all do, Peter,” T’Challa says. “But Shuri is working on it.”

“And you don’t know her yet, but you will. Kid, she’s a genius. If anyone can get us out of here, it’s her," Bucky says. "Besides, we all got each other now."  
  
Peter hugs his knees a little closer and rocks in the sand. 

“You really think we’ll get out of here soon?” he asks.   
  
T’Challa and Sam both say "yes" before Bucky can properly chew it over. Truthfully he’d never considered anything else. The second this place or that place or whatever it fucking was—the second Steve’s name had fallen through the cracks of his new reality, the possibility of him being anywhere but at home with him was null and void and completely fucking unacceptable.

They’ve been taken from each other enough goddamn times, and Bucky’s done. No more.

Give me back to Steve or bring him here, but enough. _Enough_.

“You mean you can’t feel how close we already are?” Bucky asks. “I’ll level with you, I don’t know that time works here the way it does there, but there are least, I bet they’ll have us out of here within a week. Whoever’s missing you won’t even have to do it long, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Now c’mere kid, and let Sam tell you about the time I kicked his ass.”

“Please,” Sam says, but he throws Bucky a smile. “I punted you across the street like a football.”

“Disregard the overgrown pigeon, kid. He's full of it.” 

“With both legs," Sam says. "I just swooped right down out of the sky. Whap.” Sam does some kind of animated hand motion, tumbling one hand over the other while making sound effects. Bucky refuses to laugh, but his mouth does twitch a bit. 

"All lies," Bucky says, but he remembers it. Tucked away somewhere in the mass of memories that belonged to the soldier once but are all his now to claim or throw away as he pleases.   
  
“That is enough," T'Challa says, grinning. "Besides, I almost kicked both your asses once. Simultaneously. And Peter helped." 

“Wow, I really did, huh?” Peter rubs the back of his neck again. “What was up with that by the way? Is everything okay now?”

“Yeah, kid, it’s all fine now. Or it will be,” Bucky says. He reaches the metal arm out on instinct alone, ruffling Peter’s hair just like he would’ve with Becca once upon a time. Peter finally lets go of his knees and eventually sucks Bucky into a conversation about the makeup of his arm. 

The sun never sets in the orange sky, and the water stays so blue.

And when T’Challa disappears from the sand for a moment, no one says anything. They all know where he is. 


	10. Cracks Like Leaves

Shuri makes him leave the lab and go sleep.

“I want to stay too, Steve, but for one, Bucky will kill me when he gets back. For two, go. I’m kicking you out, Queen’s orders. I won’t be far behind.”

So he leaves, back to the apartment and to the bed he hopes won’t be empty much longer.

His hand sprawling on the cool sheet next to him, he can’t help the memory of the first time he and Bucky shared a bed. It’d been innocent then. Steve got sick so much and Bucky was the only other person his mother trusted aside from Mrs. Barnes. He'd ended up sleeping over a lot, guarding Steve's health so his mother could still work.

He should’ve known even then, the fervid way that Bucky held onto him. Even if they hadn’t kissed yet. Even if he hadn’t looked into those blue-gray eyes with longing so thick he thought he’d choke. He should’ve known his whole life would always be Bucky Barnes.

Coughing, so much coughing and Bucky warm against his overheated back.

_“Rogers, if you die, I’ll sock you one good. You know I know how.”_

And maybe that’s why Steve never did die. Maybe it’s because Death would’ve had to go through Bucky first to get to him.

And Steve had meant it, every word he’d said in the lab. When he got Bucky back, that was it. If he has to take him to the end of the universe to never fight another war, he'll do it. It won't be easy for Steve to look away, but there will always be another fight and another if he doesn't choose to step back, and maybe there really are other ways to fight. And Bucky, Bucky deserves the peace. The quiet. Steve’s arms around him for the rest of fucking time.

At that thought, there’s a loud crack in the bathroom. Steve grabs one of the shields sitting atop his dusty uniform. He skids into the bathroom, shield and fist at the ready. 

But there’s no one. Just an empty mirror frame filled with orange. And Steve doesn’t know why, could never explain it, but he immediately crashes the shield into it, following it with his fist. Crash, punch. Again and again and again until it starts to crack. And then he keeps going.

Until even the serum can’t keep up and he collapses onto the lid of the toilet, panting, his knuckles dripping and the the shield falling from his arm with a dull thump. 

* * *

The sky above looks different, all run through with cracks like broken glass. It puts Bucky in the mind of the leaves at autumn. Steve used to draw them back in Brooklyn, and the colors would be all wrong—partially because he used what he could find and partially because he couldn’t see the colors the way they really were—but Bucky always found them beautiful. Plus, getting to see the world the way Steve saw it? Bucky would rather do that anyhow.

Sometimes it still aches that so many of Steve’s drawings were lost in the decades between. Bucky had a whole shoebox of them once going all the way back to when they were kids. Cute little sci-fi doodles given to a friend. Intricately drawn images of Bucky, every line a pen stroke in a love letter. Every part of his body so lovingly put to paper, known so well because Steve had traced all of him with his hands and his mouth and his eyes, again and again.

A whole box that told their story in its own way. Their entire life together before the war. And he’d collected drawings then too, stowed them in his things with the intention of adding them to the rest if he made it home.

He wonders what Hydra did with the one he kept tucked in his Howlies jacket. Steve had done it one-handed while they sat side-by-side in a fox hole one night. He’d held Bucky’s hand still the entire time, tracing the way their fingers looked together. Every vein, every scar, every ridge and bump. Hand in hand—that’s how he and Stevie belonged.

_“Til the end of the line, Buck,”_ he’d whispered, everyone else asleep but them. And he’d tucked the finished drawing into Bucky’s coat himself, his palm lingering on his chest while he kissed him right there under the drizzling sky. 

“They are spreading,” T’Challa says, looking upward. “What happens when they break?”

Bucky doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.  
  
On either side of him, Peter and Sam look up too. 

* * *

One whole wall of the lab is orange.

Shuri’s running over it with instruments, flitting around like an excited bee. Here and there and here and there. Everything beeping and whirring.

“Don’t you have cannons?” Steve asks, stopping her in her tracks. He’d come to tell her about the mirror, to have her come see, to have her help him crack it wide open because he can feel it. He can feel how close Bucky is and he can’t wait anymore.

He’ll break the wall between worlds apart himself. With his bare hands. He’ll pry apart every single crack even if he leaves all his fingernails behind.

Shuri walks over to a table and opens a drawer, pulling out two cuffs shaped like panthers.

“These?” she asks. “Why?”

He looks at them. They wouldn’t fit him and he wouldn’t know how to work them even if they did.

“Shoot them. At that.” He points at the wall of orange.

“Steven, are you insane?”

“Can’t you feel it?” he asks. And fuck, maybe he is insane. “They’re right there.”

“Steve.”

“Shuri, please.” His voice breaks.   
  
 _Shuri please,_ the universe echoes.

“That ache in your chest," Steve says. "This is how you fix it. Sometimes you have to let go of what you think and just feel. I know you do.”

She glances at the wall and then back at him. One furrow of her brow, and she slides on the cuffs.   
  
“You might want to stand back.”

* * *

Bucky and Peter are talking about their favorite places in New York City when the sky lets out a resounding boom. The ocean actually trembles. The murmurs around them kick up, deafening.

And all Bucky can think is: it’s happening.

_“Bucky.”_

He feels Steve’s voice more than he hears it, each millisecond of sound a tendril wrapping around his very soul and squeezing it, claiming it.

God you can have it Stevie. Every inch. Every piece. Every broken, damaged bit and every scar and everything that’s somehow still whole and intact. All of it and all of me.

“Steve,” Bucky says back, and around him he can hear everyone else do the same—muttering names back like prayers. They should be terrified of what might happen if this place collapses, but they can't seem to feel that way at all. 

What Bucky can feel is Steve Rogers in his very bones. Then again, when in his entire life has that not been true?

The orange sky keeps breaking and he closes his eyes, remembering every moment. A bleeding boy in an alleyway to Steve’s arms around him right before that big alien bastard ruined everything they finally managed to build. 

An entire lifetime of love and love and so much _fucking_ love that it felt like drowning and Bucky never wanted to breathe again. He still never does.

He opens his eyes just in time to notice that his hands are solid again, one flesh and one metal. The right one looks just like the one Steve drew holding his, so many years ago.

Bucky smiles as the world around him crashes violently apart.

Orange and then green and then-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will be up super soon because I'm not that cruel.


	11. 'Til the End of the Line

The lab is gone. The lab is gone and the battlefield is there, and Steve’s in his uniform like all the days without Bucky never happened at all.

Bucky stands before him, looking at his hands.

“Steve?” he asks, the same way he did before, and Steve feels his heart clench in agony, preparing for it to happen all over again. Maybe they’ll live in a loop now.

But that’s okay. He’ll figure out how to break that too. Or Shuri will, and he'll do everything he can to help. 

But Bucky doesn’t go this time. He’s as solid as he ever was, more solid still when they stumble to each other and crash like trains. Steve drops the shields and snakes his arms around his waist just to feel him, solid and real and-

“Oh God, Bucky.”

“Don’t get all mushy on me, Stevie,” he says, but his hands are clutching Steve’s back like it might all fall apart if he doesn’t hold on. They’re both trembling, and the words tumble out of Steve’s mouth because he feels so much he doesn’t even know how to express it.

“Marry me. Marry me today.”

“Got a feeling people are gonna be a little busy today.”

“Doesn’t have to be official,” Steve says. “It can just be us, Buck. I’m yours, forever.”

“Steve, we’ve been unofficially married half our lives. ‘End of the line’? Will Shakespeare can eat his damn heart out.”

“Say it again,” Steve says, one hand slipping into Bucky's hair. “Please.”

“Okay,” Bucky says, leaning back and putting his hands on Steve’s shoulders. “Okay.”

He gives them a squeeze and smiles softly.

“I, James Buchanan ‘Bucky’ Barnes am with you, Steven Grant ‘Captain Asshole’ Rogers until the end of the goddamn line. And to hell with anyone or anything tries to get in our way.”

“That title doesn’t fit anymore,” Steve says. “I told you, when you made it back…”

He nods to the shields on the ground. 

"Maybe Sam will want it," Steve says. He can't think of anyone better. 

"Aren't you supposed to be marrying me?" Bucky teases.   
  
Steve smiles wider and swallows back the ache in his throat. He nods. 

“I, Steven Grant Rogers, am retiring because I’m going to the end of the line with James Buchanan ‘Don’t Call Me James or Else’ Barnes, and he deserves to come home from the war he never really wanted to fight in. And I want to be with him when he does.”

“Goddamn sap,” Bucky says, but he's smiling at Steve like he's the only thing that has ever really mattered. 

“Come here.”

They kiss in the middle of the woods. They kiss like two old married men and they kiss like two Brooklyn teens pretending they didn’t already love each other.

They kiss like the future they plan to have. An apartment in Wakanda or a brownstone in Brooklyn or a floating capsule on the edge of the Milky Way.

Wherever they go, as long as they go together, they'll be home. 

There are a billion such reunions across everything—lovers and family and friends. Kisses and tears and blinding smiles.

The scales tip back into balance, teetering and settling firmly into place. Stones scatter to the far reaches of existence once again, hidden even better than before.

The universe breathes relief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We did it, kids. 
> 
> (We'll assume something really horrible happens to Thanos when the stones sort of explode back out into the universe because I'm good with that assumption.)
> 
> Anyway, the next chapter will be a very fluffy look ahead.


	12. Retirement

_One year later_

In a strange way, Thanos succeeds in his mission. He intended to restore peace and balance, and he has for a time being. Almost losing half of existence has a lot of people laying down their weapons across the whole of the cosmos. People are kinder, more likely to offer a helping hand or lend someone the shirt off their back.

The universe, it turns out, was never short on resources. It was just short on empathy.

It has that in droves now. Things still aren’t perfect, but Steve watches things like poverty fade a bit more each day. He watches the cost of medicine fall, companies agree to stop poisoning the world. He watches people salt and burn their hatred for each other and clasp hands instead (and burn those who refuse to let go of the way things were).  
  
It’s not perfect by a long shot, and he knows greed will come back and war with it when people forget their history, but he made a promise and he’s keeping it, peace or no peace.

He sits on the edge of the testing field today in plain jeans and a navy blue tee, sketchbook open in his lap. Bucky’s laughter is infectious, and he can’t stop smiling at it. Can’t stop smiling at the fact that Shuri’s yelling at Bucky for being ‘reckless with her technology’ either. Of course, she’s laughing too.

“You are going to fall and break your other arm, James.”

She only calls him James when she’s trying to be stern. It doesn’t work. Steve grins harder and keeps trying to get the laugh lines around Bucky’s eyes right.

“A matching pair wouldn’t be so bad.” Bucky shrugs. 

They're testing a jet pack today, and Steve’s pretty sure Shuri only built it because Bucky never stops rambling about jet packs and how all his favorite sci-fi stories promised him jet packs. It is the future and _where_ is his _jet pack_?

Wakandan technology is so far beyond jet packs, but yet here they are, Bucky soaring while a rhino in the distance stares like it’s never been more bored in its whole life.

The pack runs out of fuel eventually, and Bucky manages a shaky landing while it sputters out a few last moments of propulsion. The first thing he does when his boots touch the ground is beam at Steve, and for a moment, his smile is the brightest point on Earth.

“That was great, Shuri. Maybe we could play with the engine. Make it go longer? I bet Sam would love an upgrade.”

Steve nods at that suggestion. Sam’s Cap now after all, even if most of what he does is search and rescue work these days. Hell of a lot easier to get a family out of a burning high-rise when you’ve got wings.

“Oh, I’m sure you are doing all of this for your very good friend Sam,” she says, helping him slide it off. “But we can.”

“Thanks by the way,” Bucky says, because just like Steve he knows it was an indulgence. Then again, it’s not like Shuri doesn’t enjoy making things. Both useful and frivolous.

“You’re welcome, Bucky. Just do your homework. Don’t get too caught up in...” She waves in Steve’s direction. “That reactor is going to take work.”

“You got it, princess,” he says, saluting her. She punches him lightly on the arm and leaves the testing field.

Steve doesn’t move. He’s still shading the straps of the jet pack. He has to admit he likes the way the harness fits across Bucky’s chest, how it pulls his tee shirt taut and highlights the definition of his shoulders and chest. 

“You’re smirking, Stevie,” Bucky says, sinking down beside him and leaning over to get a peek.

“Yeah, well, my husband is sort of a knockout,” Steve says, moving his pencil up to add another line to Bucky’s hair now that he's got the reference up close.

“Is that right?” Bucky asks. 

“Apparently I have a thing for you in harnesses,” Steve says casually, before blushing furiously when he remembers that there are other kinds of harnesses. 

 

“Harnesses, huh?” Bucky asks. “That why that part’s so detailed?”

“What’s your homework from Shuri?” Steve asks, because if he doesn’t change the subject, he’ll definitely end up having to close his sketchbook before he’s done. Bucky’s lips are already starting to curl mischievously.

“It’s a theory Shuri has on extracting energy from the background radiation of the universe. Sustainable, renewable energy for the globe basically.”

“No more burning coal,” Steve says.

“Exactly. Could power everything from phones to airplanes. Could power ships for interplanetary travel too. We could see space, Steve.”

And Bucky says it with so much wonder that Steve doesn’t point out the fact they could already do that. Rocket had certainly offered. Of course, he’d asked for Bucky’s arm in exchange, but details.

“I’d follow you anywhere, Buck.” Steve adds the final detail of the drawing, the thing he’s always saved for last since he first drew Bucky as a boy, back before he ever even knew he’d love him so deeply that literally nothing could keep them apart, not death, not Hydra, not Thanos or the stones. 

A small dip in his chin, shaded in perfectly. His best feature and the one that Steve could draw blindfolded and with nothing but a thousand wonderful memories.

“Do you want it?” he asks, scribbling his initials at the bottom. He always asks this, despite the fact that Bucky always answers the same way.

“Of course I do.”

He’s got another box, a lot like the one he had when they were younger. He’s even managed to get some of those old drawings back by talking about them in interviews, tugging on people’s heartstrings in that charming way that Bucky can.

Tony finds a few as well, spends God-only-knows amounts of money on them and sends them over with Peter when he visits. There’s a sketch of two sets of tattered shoes slotted together that Bucky stares at for so long, quietly humming Billie Holiday before he leaves their apartment and comes back with a frame to fit it.

And Tony and Bucky will never be friends, and Steve knows Tony’s said as much about how he’ll “never be able to look at Barnes’s face,” but it’s an olive branch if there ever was one. Especially considering the explosive argument they'd had over Peter a few days after the Undoing. Bucky amicably takes it and sends a thank you letter with Peter when he leaves. 

The jetpack drawing goes in the box too, atop a sketch of Bucky leaning over a circuit board, his brow furrowed in concentration, hair knotted atop his head.

“You ever imagine what our lives would be like if we’d stayed in Brooklyn?” Bucky asks, laying himself over the foot of the bed. “If there’d never been a war or if we’d just fought it and come home?”

“A few times. I also imagined going back to look for you after you fell. That day on the bridge when I saw you again, I've thought about it a million times since. If I'd just...”

Bucky nods. He still doesn’t like talking about the soldier, but he can now and he does. 

“Sometimes I feel so selfish,” he says.

“Why’s that?”

“Because that would be the best thing. For there to have never been a war. For all the people the soldier killed... But God, Stevie, I look at you and think about the fact that we can sleep in the same bed every night, that your body isn’t always trying to kill you, that I can kiss you wherever you want and that you wear a ring around your finger telling the whole world you’re mine and I’m yours. I think about all of that, and I wouldn’t undo any of it if I had the chance. Not a goddamn thing.”

“Then I guess I’m selfish too, Buck.”

Bucky smiles and hops up, heading for the stereo. He taps the bluetooth button and fiddles on his phone. 

A few piano notes, soft jazz, and Bucky sidles into his space, looking like every version of himself all at once.   
  
“I still can’t dance, pal,” Steve says, smiling.

“I could give you a lesson, I guess.” Bucky wraps his arms around him, and Steve holds him just as close. They move around the apartment in their socks, Bucky dipping him and Steve attempting to dip him back just as smoothly. And if Steve steps on his feet a few times or almost drops him when he trips over the rug, well, Bucky only laughs.

They’re in the future, the one that Bucky always dreamed about, the one that surpasses even his wildest imaginations. They’re in love. They’re married. And they’re dancing, dancing and thinking of peppermint and a fateful afternoon in Brooklyn and two pairs of tattered shoes moving side-by-side.

And, maybe the most important of all the things, they're happy. So happy that sometimes they almost ache with joy.   
  
Bucky grins broadly, presses a kiss to Steve's mouth, and dips him again without breaking apart.  

 

_And after all is said and done,_

_to think that I’m the lucky one._  
  
_I can’t believe you’re in love with me._  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I had a part in this that referred to them attending a Pride parade in NYC and it just refused to fit without knocking the narrative out of whack, but basically the boys march in it as an openly bi couple with some bi pride colors streaked on their cheeks. Sam and Nat march behind them wrapped in an ace flag. It is a thing that happened. 
> 
> I also think that part of Wakanda's outreach program has become high-tech prosthetics, especially for kids and veterans (double especially for kids and veterans who are lgbtqia and/or of color). Bucky is very, very involved in it. 
> 
> Every time Peter comes to visit is amazing and also mildly worrying for Bucky, T'Challa, and the entire Dora because he and Shuri invent some really wild stuff just because they can. "Okay, but hear me out..." is never a good thing when it comes out of Peter's mouth. 
> 
> \----
> 
> If you enjoyed this, please take a second to share it with a friend or [reblog this post.](http://bisexualstarbucky.tumblr.com/post/177005684402/i-would-tear-the-world-apart-for-you-by)
> 
> I'm on Twitter now too [@BiStarBucky](http://www.twitter.com/bistarbucky).
> 
> Also please let me know that you liked it or what your favorite part was or that you laughed or cried. I like hearing from you guys. Even if all you got is one word and a key smash, come at me. <3


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